By Angela Prentner-Smith

WE need to talk about why psychological safety is a necessary part of your diversity and inclusion strategy.

Let’s start with some buzzword bingo. I managed to get four into that opening paragraph alone.

I joke, but these are important topics – the buzz for a reason. Increasing diversity, inclusion and psychological safety in your team and your organisation brings tangible business benefits.

Diversity, the act of being different, together – the existence of different characteristics in a group of people. It is a given that people are all different, and they bring different strengths. Diversity of thought, and diverse teams are proven to be more successful.

So, we should all be hiring and retaining diversity. Then there’s the "but" – affinity bias. That unconscious decision-maker that means we hire and "like" people like us. Where we logically know that diversity is good, we may well still recruit "people like us", limiting access to different lived experience, views of the world and insights. We need to build practices into our organisations that mitigate our biases in recruitment and promotion.

One we have a diverse team, how do we make sure each member feels included?

Maintaining a psychologically safe workplace, is part of ensuring you are not just diverse, but you are fostering a place everyone can flourish. Research tells us that psychological safety is better for everyone, but even more important to minorities. Minority stress – that is the weight of being "not typical", which can result in stigma, indirect and direct discrimination and worse – is real. Reducing this stress means your diverse workforce can perform even better.

What defines as being a minority, depends on the group that one is a member of. As a neurodivergent person, in the general society, I am a neurominority, however in a team with a majority of neurodivergent thinkers, I am not. However, the status quo and the assumed societal truths we take into a workplace, can be biased to the norm – even when the workforce is not.

What do I mean by psychological safety? Amy Edmundson is the person of influence around this term; she defines it as "shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking". It’s the ability to debate professionally, raise concerns, fail safely, and share learnings. The benefits being, your team can innovate better and faster, reduce risks (if we know about a mistake, we can put measures in to fix it).

We know that not all work cultures support speaking up, and rather rely on hierarchies, fear and in some cases humiliation. Subtle leadership actions can hugely damage a workplace’s ability to operate with the candour and honesty that belies a high performing workplace.

Psychological safety allows individuals to display their minority selves, share their different views and lived experience. They can "unmask" so to speak.

Psychological safety underpins a high-performing team, improves learning performance, reduces risk and creates a culture ready to innovate, but more so is critical in harnessing the power of diversity.

Angela Prentner-Smith is Founder and MD of This is Milk